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What would Robert Smithson have achieved if he’d used brushes instead of boulders and earth? For an approximate answer, check out Nellie King Solomon. Solomon’s wall-sized acrylic-on-mylar paintings may lack the scale of Smithson’s pirouette in the Great Salt Lake, but her style of “flow painting” – developed over years of hard-won process experiments – achieves a similar impact: It transfixes us with simulations of things that appear natural and man-made – often all at once and in the same picture.
Solomon pours paint onto mylar and then lets it flow freely into puddles which she shapes and textures with custom-made hand tools, sweeping the liquid into circular arcs that are stained by rivulets that coalesce into retina-stinging plumes and dark shadows. Into these she mixes other substances which, when congealed, assume the texture of barnacles or of briny mineral deposits imprinted with fossils.
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While the alleged tension between macrocosmic and microcosmic has become something of a cliché in abstract painting, Solomon’s marriage of opposites is a palpable fact: When you look at her work it’s impossible to say whether you’re seeing a magnified view of a molecular reaction or a vision of the Earth’s crust from outer space. Both appear simultaneously and with equal force.
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Throughout, Solomon uses circular forms repeatedly. It’s an ancient practice with many contemporary adherents, most of whom lean toward “spiritual abstraction”. Solomon’s interests appear to lay elsewhere. She seems more closely aligned with Edward Burtynsky and David Maisel, two environmentally concerned photographers who depict ruined (but lovely ) landscapes shot from aerial or elevated perspectives. Like Burtynsky and Maisel, Solomon cloaks virulent toxicity in eye-candy beauty.
–DAVID M. ROTH
Nellie King Solomon Diamond Rings @ Brian Gross Fine Art through October 30, 2010.
Cover detail: “Magenta and Hooker’s Green Rings 1”, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on mylar, 96 x 96”
Learn more about Nellie King Solomon.